Like A Rolling Stone part 18: They wanted to check if the spirit of the lyrics was preserved

Posted on February 26, 2025 by Tony Attwood

by Jochen Markhorst

XVIII    They wanted to check if the spirit of the lyrics was preserved

Anton Voyl has the nagging, unpleasant feeling that something is missing from his life. “Il y avait un manquant. Il y avait un oubli, un blanc, un trou qu’aucun n’avait vu, n’avait su, n’avait pu, n’avait voulu voir – There was something missing. There was an omission, a blank, a hole that no one had seen, had known, had been able to see, had wanted to see.” But he does not know what.

“Beneath the mass of illusions that his imagination was constantly dictating to him, he thought he could see a nodal point, an unknown core that he could touch with his finger but which he would always miss the moment he was about to reach it.”

Or, as Gilbert Adair translates entirely in style:

“Vowl, who, a victim of optical illusions, of sly tricks that his imagination is playing on him, starts to fancy that a focal point is at long last within his grasp, though just as it’s about to solidify it sinks again into a void.”

The reader gets to know Anton and his struggles for four chapters, and from Chapter 5 (!) he has disappeared. And the people looking for him from the fifth chapter onwards die when they get too close to the truth.

The best-known and most feared challenge for translators is Georges Perec’s novel La Disparition (“The Disappearance”, 1969), a 300-page novel from which the letter e has disappeared. “E-lipogrammatic,” as the language professors then call it. Only the most skilled, most creative translators manage to convert a readable version of La Disparition with the same restriction into their own language. Which has only succeeded in seven languages since 1969: English (A Void), Swedish (Försvinna), Turkish (Kayboluş), German (Anton Voyls Fortgang), Dutch (‘t Manco), Italian (La scomparsa), and the most ambitious, Spanish (El secuestro, 1997). The Spanish translators feel they must impose the same constraint on themselves as Perec, and therefore choose the most common letter in Spanish, the letter a. “To attempt to rewrite La Disparition without the letter a is to recognise the importance of the constraint in the original and accept the consequences,” explains one of the four translators, Hermes Salceda y Regina Vega.

It takes any translator years to translate La Disparition. It is a monstrous job. But it could be worse: Perec appeases his hunger for the forbidden e with his next novel Les Revenentes (1972) in which the e is the only vowel, which thus seems completely untranslatable. “J’erre près des berges de l’Elster. Elles sentent le genêt et les evergreens.” Try translating this with an e as the only vowel: “I’m wandering along the banks of the Elster. They smell of broom and evergreens.” In 1996, Ian Monk succeeded in English (The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Seks: “Fecklessness led me hence between the Elster’s scented evergreens, the fennel, the feverfew”), and exactly half a century after Perec, Dutchman Guido van der Wiel managed to do it (De Wedergekeerden, 2022).

Bob Dylan – Return To Me:

Many degrees less gruesome, but still pretty cruel, is the one time when the licensee of Dylan’s lyrics imposes a restrictive condition: on the (as far as we know) first licensed translation, the German Bob Dylan Songtexte 1962-1985 by German translators Carl Weissner and Walter Hartmann. At least, that is how the gentlemen justify their sometimes clumsy solutions on the very first page:

“In the license agreement for this German edition, Bob Dylan demands that the rhyme of the original be preserved as much as possible. Operations like these are always problematic. In many cases it is inevitable to deviate from the content of the original. It is clear that the extent to which one may go there is quite debatable. We have tried to keep it within reasonable limits, without doing things by half.”

It is a bizarre, unreasonable requirement to “keep the rhyme of the original,” and it tells two things:

1) Dylan finds the form more important than the content

2) Dylan has no knowledge of foreign languages

Or he thinks, let’s drive those Germans crazy, that’s possible too of course. In any case, Carl and Walter go to great lengths to adhere to Dylans rhyme schemes – with implications for the content. Bring that bottle over here has to become Bring diese Flasche hier rüber ins Licht (“Bring this bottle here into the light”), When the rivers freeze and summer ends can only be translated with Wo die Flüsse zufrieren und der Sommer stirbt (“Where the rivers freeze over and summer dies”) and Daddy’s in the alley, he’s looking for the fuse is now Daddy kriecht durch die Gosse, wo die Zundschnür rußt (“Daddy crawls through the gutter where the tinder soots”).

Dylan’s delight in inner rhyme and assonance the gentlemen – understandably – prefer to ignore altogether, otherwise it would really be a mission impossible. So the slyly concealed rhyme finds of “I Want You” just evaporate, nothing remains of the irresistible euphoniousness of Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re trying to be so quiet with Immer ist es die Nacht, die dir Streiche spielt, wenn du schlafen willst (“It’s always the night that plays tricks on you when you want to sleep”).

Weissner and Hartmann, by the way, are skilful and creative translators, who often enough hit the mark despite that odd limitation. The opening couplet of “One Too Many Mornings” is as beautiful and gentle in German as it is in the source text;

Am Ende der Straße bellen Hunde,
Es ist Abend, die Nacht kommt schnell.
Und während die Nacht sich niedersenkt,
Verstummt auch das Hundegebell

(Dogs are barking at the end of the street,
It's evening, night is coming soon.
And as the night descends,
The dogs stop barking)

Ernst Schulz – Viel zu spät und meilenweit zurück:

But against the ferocious power and sparkling language pleasure of “Like A Rolling Stone”, the constricted gentlemen don’t stand a chance, at least: not within that cruel and short-sighted restriction imposed;

Es gab mal ne Zeit, da warst du schick gekleidet
Hast den Bettlern einen Groschen hingeworfen, stimmts?
Und wenn man dich anrief und sagte „Paß auf, du liegst schief“
Hast du gedacht, daß man dich auf den Arm nimmt

There was a time when you were dressed stylishly
You threw a penny to the beggars, right?
And when they called you and said ‘Watch out, you're wrong
You thought you were being taken for a ride

Gone is the inner rhyme time-fine-dime-prime, gone is the surprising rhyme find didn’t you-kiddin’ you, and of the triplet call-doll-fall, Carl & Walter have barely managed to save two thirds (anrief-schief). And with the following 37 verses, that doesn’t get any better either – which we can’t really blame our gagged friends for, of course.

Perhaps the enforced scorching of Dylan’s best poetry eventually made its way to New York. In any case, these kinds of cruel translation demands are no longer made, and the policy since the 1990s seems to be: let’s just trust that professional translators know what they are doing – and at least have a better grasp of song lyric translations than legally trained copyright guardians. Though that policy is not yet fully crystallised, as a rather bizarre anecdote from Polish translator Filip Łobodziński demonstrates:

“In 2015, I had almost all my first anthology ready AND two thirds of the double-CD album I wanted to release, where me and my band dylan.pl played my translations of Dylan songs. In 2016, I already had a label that wanted to get it released, the only thing was to obtain permission from Sony. All Sony wanted was to send them the Polish lyrics AND their literal translations into English. Three weeks later I had an OK. They told us they wanted to check if the spirit of the lyrics was preserved. Not the rhymes, not the exact words.”

Asking for a literal translation to check whether “the spirit of the lyrics was preserved”? That’s like asking for a black-and-white photo to check whether the colours have been reproduced correctly. “That’s not how this works,” to quote Betty from the legendary Esurance commercial, “that’s not how any of this works.”

Filip was fortunately allowed to roll on. Like a rock ‘n’ rolling stone.

To be continued. Next up Like A Rolling Stone part 19: The generous ghost

————-

Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *